Russia to America – We Know Your Citizens Better Than Your Government Does

Mark Zuckerberg & his Facebook Russian Troll Farm Woes

Does anyone remember last year when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg vowed to put an end to fake news on Facebook? I do, but as a woman one might expect that, always bringing up the good old days to toss it back in your face, at just the right moment.

Perhaps Mark should have been more focused on all of those accounts that they identified on 9/6/17, that appeared to have had $100,000 in ad spending (the number could be much higher) from June of 2015 to May of 2017 that in fact, violated its policies, and were found to be linked to a Russian trolling farm…that was backed by the Russian Government.

Bravo Mark…bravo.

So now Mark seems a wee bit lost here, he went from full on denial to being open to “reviewing” proposed legislation should it pique his subtle interest.

Overall, Facebook had several opportunities to catch this and deal with it, long before it made headline news, like back in 2015.

The problems were:

Blatant Denial

Lack of Staff

Searching for any type of related ads

Taking our then President a bit more seriously

Having the ability to suck it up and take the blame gracefully

Stop blaming automated algorithms (Facebook’s favorite scapegoat), and just suck it up and take responsibility

Many are wondering and asking how Russia figured out who to target with these ads?

Well, that is actually a pretty easy one. Russia, they knew what the average american dreamed of and wanted in terms of the perfect balance of its government and it’s people.

We could spend all day and night trying to guess as to how they knew that, but the honest truth is, has anyone taken a walk through social media lately?

It’s an open book into what american’s think, feel, how we live, what we want, what we desire, our hopes, dreams, information about our interpersonal relationships, how we feel about our jobs, and how we feel about our government, what we would like to see it doing.

What we dislike about the government, a candidate, what we speculate, the rumor mill…you name it, I could go all day with this list.

The point is, that if I can see that within the first 5 minutes of being on any social media account that I have, so can everyone else, and it matters very little who you friend, block, unfriend. Things are shared whether you like it or not.

And let us not forget our own media here in the US, they tend to spread as much misinformation as they possibly can, rarely do a correction story, bring on “experts” to talk about what they think is going on and in general, report speculation and opinion as if they were facts.

It would not have taken much or long for the Russian’s to figure out just what type of fake news or ad’s it sponsored much less who to target.

All of that said, it does not negate the fact that people do not buy into what they do not believe or want to believe.

So many bought into the fake news and all of those fake ad’s because deep down, it was truly something they wanted to believe in.

You cannot package it any better than Russia did here.

They knew the American people better than our own government did at the time and I am willing to bet, that they still do.